40 years since Alma Ata: It's back to the future for Health for All

20 February 2018

Quite a lot has changed in the last 40 years, right? And yet, four decades since the 1978 signing of the international Alma Ata declaration in Almaty, Kazakhstan, meeting the essential health needs of people through primary health care has once again been highlighted as the key to the attainment of Health for All by a ‘new’ global movement.

Whatever you think about the originality, legitimacy and
potential impact of the movement (I’m a deeply cynical Brit): it’s happening. 2018 is the year of Universal Health Coverage.

IDS’ Health and Nutrition Cluster, in collaboration with
partners, is shaping a number of these important moments, and helping to bring
a critical development perspective to debates and issues that have perhaps been
traditionally dominated by the public health disciplines.

To highlight just three of these activities:

Accountability for health equity

In April, we will launch a new edition of the IDS Bulletin focusing on ‘Accountability
for Health Equity’, which places relationships of power at the centre of
our understanding of how health systems function – or don’t – for all levels of
society.

The Bulletin explores the nature of accountability politics
‘in time’ – the longitudinal nature of change and cycles of national and
transnational accountability efforts; tackles the contested politics of
‘naming’ and measuring accountability, and the intersecting dimensions of
marginalisation and exclusion that are missing from current debates; looks at
the shifting nature of power in global health and new configurations of health
actors and social contracts in this new era; and concludes with a proposal for
long-term approaches to institutionalisation of pro-equity accountability processes
(Nelson, et al. Forthcoming).

As I hope you will find out for yourselves, my colleagues,
Erica Nelson, Gerry Bloom and Alex Shankland, have done a great job at bringing
this edition together at an important time for the renewal of the UHC movement.

South-South learning on innovation for UHC

In June, IDS, alongside the Public Health Foundation of
India and AMREF Health Africa, will be convening a meeting in Bangalore to
mobilise South-South learning on the potential for innovative technology to
help achieve UHC in Asia and Africa. It will bring together technology
innovators, investors, government officials and public and private sector
health service providers to consider practical strategies for transforming
health care delivery in Asia and Africa. It will be followed by events in Washington
D.C., Liverpool (UK) and Kigali (Rwanda) in 2018 and 2019. We are excited by
the energy and leadership of our partners, and their desire to explore diverse
avenues for engagement with new and emerging actors.

Advancing health systems for all in the SDG era

In October, IDS, as a member of a consortium of leading UK
organisations, will co-host with the World Health Organization and the Alliance
for Health Policy and Systems Research, the largest global gathering of health
systems policymakers, practitioners and researchers: the Fifth Global Symposium on Health
Systems Research (HSR2018). We are expecting high level participation from
many global actors, and are grateful to the support from, among others, the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Global Symposia are the flagship events of Health Systems Global (HSG), a
growing global membership society that IDS has an established role in as part
of HSG’s secretariat, working closely with health policy and systems leaders to
build the field of health policy and systems research around the world.

It’s going to be quite a year! We at IDS are privileged to
be working with partners around the world to make these and other exciting contributions
to a new global movement for UHC during and beyond the 40th
anniversary year of Alma Ata.